Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓
Lemon Pudding
Ingredients
Directions
Make the dough
Sift the flour into a bowl.
Mix in the chopped suet and sugar.
Add the grated rind of the lemons.
Beat the egg and mix in the juice of one lemon.
Combine the egg mixture with the dry ingredients to form a dough.
Add water if needed.
Boil the pudding
Dip a cloth in boiling water.
Place the pudding in the cloth and tie the cloth securely around the pudding.
Plunge the wrapped pudding into boiling water.
Boil the pudding for two hours.
Remove the pudding from the cloth and place the pudding on a hot dish.
Make the sauce
Squeeze the juice of the second lemon into a small saucepan.
Add sugar and ½ cup of water to the saucepan.
Bring the sauce to a boil.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
The flavor team
The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.
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Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together92,116 recipes
Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
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Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together106,462 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together30,404 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together53,532 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together44,316 recipes
Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).
Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Flour
- Forms the structure of the dough that holds the pudding together.
- Suet
- Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it cooks.
- Egg
- Binds the dough and helps hold its shape during boiling.
- Lemon
- Provides aroma and sharp acidity from the rind and juice.
- Sugar
- Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the lemon.
The step that matters
Plunge the wrapped pudding into boiling water. The water must stay at a rolling boil for the full two hours. If it drops, the pudding cooks unevenly and can turn heavy, so keep the pot topped up with boiling water.
Swap the lemon
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, egg, sugar):
- Raisinfits better
- Vanillafits better
- Lemonthe original
- Figfits about as well
Fit is the average pairing score against flour, egg, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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